Salman Abu Sitta was just ten years old when the Nakba—the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948—happened, forcing him from his home near Beersheba. Like many Palestinians of his generation, this traumatic loss and his enduring desire to return would be the defining features of his life from that moment on. Abu Sitta vividly evokes the vanished world of his family and home on the eve of the Nakba, giving a personal and very human face to the dramatic events of 1930s and 1940s Palestine as Zionist ambitions and militarization expanded under the British mandate. He chronicles his life in exile, from his family’s flight to Gaza, his teenage years as a student in Nasser’s Egypt, his formative years in 1960s London, his life as a family man and academic in Canada, to several sojourns in Kuwait. Abu Sitta’s long and winding journey has taken him through many of the seismic events of the era, from the 1956 Suez War to the 1991 Gulf War. This rich and moving memoir is imbued throughout with a burning sense of justice and a determination to recover and document what rightfully belongs to his people, given expression in his groundbreaking mapping work on his homeland. Abu Sitta, with warmth and wit, tells his story and that of Palestine.

Salman Abu Sitta was born in 1937 in Ma‘in Abu Sitta, in the Beersheba district of mandate Palestine. An engineer by profession, he is best known for his cartographic work on Palestine and his work on the Palestinian Right of Return. He is the author of six books and over 300 articles and papers on Palestine, including The Atlas of Palestine, 1917–1966 (2010). He is the founder and president of the Palestine Land Society.

"Abu Sitta has ensured that the keys to the Palestinians' stolen homes will inevitably reopen the never forgotten doors."—Vacy Vlazna, Al Jazeera. “Abu Sitta’s memoir conveys a still burning sense of outrage at the injustice of the dispossession of the Palestinians and the denial of their rights—a personal and collective Nakba without end.”—Ian Black, The Guardian. "The events of 1948 have been told elsewhere, but rarely with the immediacy and poignancy of this child’s-eye view. . . . All of Abu Sitta’s research has led him to the conclusion that, far from being 'full up,' Israel has plenty of land available for the rehousing of refugees in and around the towns and villages depopulated in 1948. He envisions a state of peaceful coexistence, after the demise of a racist ideology that bears the seeds of its own destruction."—Hilary Wise, Middle East Eye. "The spirit of Dr. Abu Sitta's Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir mirrors precisely the dynamic quintessence and will of its creator – in a word, sumoud—a compelling steadfastness to his homeland Palestine and to the right of return of every Palestinian."—The Palestine Chronicle. "Salman Abu Sitta writes about a personal experience, but he also tells the story of a people and a nation. A highly recommended work from a well-known scholar that will appeal to anyone seeking to understand this story."—Dina Matar, author of What It Means to be Palestinian. "There is much debate about the origins of the quotation that Palestine was a land without people for a people without a land, but no doubt at all that it was Golda Meir who said that 'there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.' Palestinians remaining there and the diaspora scattered worldwide, have totally disproved these statements in the hundreds of books and histories and mapping that have been published since the Nakba. Many are feats of great scholarship. Salman Abu Sitta has the broadest experience and longest tale to tell of any Palestinian I have ever met and this comprehensive history and geography of the land and its people should be on everyone's bookshelf. Everyone that is, who seeks to understand fully the greatest injustice of the 20th Century and how it affected the Palestinian people who still have not given up the hope of return to their homes in Palestine. Nor should they."––Baroness Jenny Tonge. "In a life lived intensely, with unflagging curiosity and vocal outrage at the injustices that have beleaguered his people, Salman Abu Sitta is to be celebrated for his tenacity, intelligence and ability not to lose heart despite all the odds. This accessible and informative book describes all that he has lived through as a Palestinian, both on his own land and as a refugee. It also presents very clearly the fundamental need for the 'right of return' to be enshrined in any just and lasting peace in the region."—Selma Dabbagh. "Abu Sitta is a leading expert on the 'nakbah' and what is nowadays widely described as the "ethnic cleansing" it involved. He is also a passionate advocate of the "right of return", under which Palestinian refugees must be allowed to go back to their lost lands and property."—The Guardian. "An extraordinary engineer and scholar."—Edward Said. "This manuscript is a valuable and unique addition to the genre of Palestinian autobiographies in English."—Dr. Rochelle Davis, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University. “This book is a wonderful mixture of autobiography, history, and politics. It is both riveting and very moving. Salman Abu Sitta weaves very skilfully his personal story with the broader story of the Palestine tragedy. Underlying it all is the terrible injustice that the Zionist movement has inflicted on him, his family, and his entire people. His book conveys eloquently and powerfully his own experience of dispossession and exile as well as his unflinching determination to map his return. . . . A really outstanding Palestinian memoir which deserves the widest possible readership.”—Avi Shlaim, author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. “Especially since less has been written about South Palestine than about other parts of the country, Abu Sitta’s account is a valuable contribution to Palestinian political and social history. “—Sally Bland, The Jordan Times. "This memoir is crucial to understanding why and how the Palestinian question has not been put to rest after 68 years.”—Al-Ahram Weekly. "Much more than a personal memoir."—Middle East Monitor. “This is a highly readable book, much recommended to anyone with an interest in Palestinian history. More than that, it is a significant piece of documentation, recounting events and ways of life which have largely been forgotten or erased.”—Sarah Ivring, The Electronic Intifada. "This is a book that should be a mandatory study for young Palestinians and all those who believe in the justice of their cause and their right to return"—Daud Abdullah, Middle East Monitor. “This book’s most important contribution to scholarship may lie in Abu Sitta’s subtle refutation of the notion that Palestinian refugees were passive victims of an unwelcome fate. . . . As a comprehensive account of nearly a century of Palestinian history, [Mapping My Return] is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the experiences and records of Palestinian refugees.”—Anne Irfan, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

A Topographical Study

This comprehensive study, first published by the AUC Press in 1992 examines the structure of the Ayyubid administration in Cairo and the associated military, religious, and commercial milieux. It goes on to survey in detail the changes in the general layout of Cairo–in defenses, governmental and private buildings, water resources, religious institutions and cemetery areas, and markets and commercial establishments. Click here to download the free PDF.

Selections from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332–1406)

The Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (A.D. 1332–1406) are in many ways the most remarkable product of Islamic thought. Not only did Ibn Khaldun sum up the accumulated knowledge and leading doctrines of his civilization, but in many fields he broke new ground and anticipated the findings of Western social scientists of the last two centuries. The passages have been grouped to illustrate Ibn Khaldun’s views on historical method, geography, economics, public finance, population, society and state, and the theory of being and theory of knowledge. This selection is intended for students of thought, rather than specialized Arabic scholars, and for those interested in the intellectual background of the Arab world.

Archaeologies, Museums, and the Struggle for Identities from World War I to Nasser

The sensational discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun’s tomb, close on the heels of Britain’s declaration of Egyptian independence, accelerated the growth in Egypt of both Egyptology as a formal discipline and of ‘pharaonism’—popular interest in ancient Egypt—as an inspiration in the struggle for full independence. Emphasizing the three decades from 1922 until Nasser’s revolution in 1952, this compelling follow-up to Whose Pharaohs? looks at the ways in which Egypt developed its own archaeologies—Islamic, Coptic, and Greco-Roman, as well as the more dominant ancient Egyptian. Each of these four archaeologies had given birth to, and grown up around, a major antiquities museum in Egypt. Later, Cairo, Alexandria, and Ain Shams universities joined in shaping these fields. Contesting Antiquity in Egypt brings all four disciplines, as well as the closely related history of tourism, together in a single engaging framework.

Throughout this semi-colonial era, the British fought a prolonged rearguard action to retain control of the country while the French continued to dominate the Antiquities Service, as they had since 1858. Traditional accounts highlight the role of European and American archaeologists in discovering and interpreting Egypt’s long past. Donald Reid redresses the balance by also paying close attention to the lives and careers of often-neglected Egyptian specialists. He draws attention not only to the contests between westerners and Egyptians over the control of antiquities, but also to passionate debates among Egyptians themselves over pharaonism in relation to Islam and Arabism during a critical period of nascent nationalism.

Drawing on rich archival and published sources, extensive interviews, and material objects ranging from statues and murals to photographs and postage stamps, this comprehensive study by one of the leading scholars in the field will make fascinating reading for scholars and students of Middle East history, archaeology, politics, and museum and heritage studies, as well as for the interested lay reader.

Early U.S. Visitors to Egypt, 1774–1839

The Treaty of Ghent signed in 1814, ending the War of 1812, allowed Americans once again to travel abroad. Medical students went to Paris, artists to Rome, academics to Göttingen, and tourists to all European capitals. More intrepid Americans ventured to Athens, to Constantinople, and even to Egypt. Beginning with two eighteenth-century travelers, this book then turns to the 25-year period after 1815 that saw young men from East Coast cities, among them graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, traveling to the lands of the Bible and of the Greek and Latin authors they had first known as teenagers. Naval officers off ships of the Mediterranean squadron visited Cairo to see the pyramids. Two groups went on business, one importing steam-powered rice and cotton mills from New York, the other exporting giraffes from the Kalahari Desert for wild animal shows in New York. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries together with previously neglected newspaper accounts, as well as a handful of published accounts, this book offers a new look at the early American experience in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean world. More than thirty illustrations complement the stories told by the travelers themselves.